


love me when the chips are down

by lilyjpotter



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, serial killer au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-21
Updated: 2018-01-21
Packaged: 2019-03-07 13:49:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,202
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13436061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilyjpotter/pseuds/lilyjpotter
Summary: james is a writer and lily kills people. its fine





	love me when the chips are down

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flagpoles](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flagpoles/gifts).



> happy birthday goaty. i love you even despite the ham thing

She barges into his apartment one day, throws herself down on his couch like it’s hers.

He glances at her, once, over the top of his latest manuscript. It’s crap, and he knows this, but he doesn’t care.

“You’re getting blood on my floor,” he tells her.

“Don’t care,” she says, taking out a cigarette, using Sirius’s lighter that she stole last week and is yet to return.

She swings her boots up on the ottoman, staining it scarlet. Already, she’s costing him a fortune in dry-cleaning. He thinks the owner is starting to get suspicious.

“Good day?” he asks her, trying to pretend he hasn’t been waiting up just to see her, just to make sure she isn’t dead.

She takes a drag of her cigarette, blows the smoke in his direction. “I killed three guys in the parking lot behind the Diamondbacks game, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Who won?” He’s relying on her for this information.

“Dodgers, 3-1.”

“Damnit,” he says, “I put $10 on the Diamonds.”

“Well,” she tells him, “aren’t you stupid.”

He is. He really is.

There’s a silence, in which he tries to pick apart the freckles on her cheeks from the blood splatters, and in which she blows smoke rings at the ceiling. He still has no idea how she does that.

She cases him while he cases her. It’s strange. He’s making sure the blood all over her isn’t actually hers while she’s thinking she could reach out and touch him if she wanted to, rake her nails over him, feel the pulse in his throat.

She breaks the silence first. “Stop staring at me,” she tells him.

“Wasn’t,” he lies.

Trying to distract herself, she reaches forward, stubs her cigarette out on his coffee table, which is now littered with burn marks, most of them hers. “You don’t have to wait up for me, you know.”

“I’ve been working on my manuscript.” Another lie.

She knows he’s had writers’ block for the past six weeks, but she doesn’t say this. “How’s it going?”

“Shit, but thanks for asking.”

She smiles, lying back on the couch, dragging the blanket over her, the one that he keeps there for her. “Anytime, Potter.”

* * *

The first time they met was a week after he’d moved into his new apartment, and she broke in through the window.

Sirius was playing loud, obnoxious music, while Remus was in the kitchen drinking soda out of a Spongebob Squarepants glass. James was on the couch, trying to figure out an idea for a novel. So far all he had come up with was a story about a man who developed a superpower from calcium build-up. He was going to call him the Milkman. Peter had gone to the toilet.

The coffee table was littered with empty Chinese takeaway containers that Remus had brought from the restaurant beneath his apartment. James had supplied the paper plates and cutlery, while Sirius’s contribution was the cheap, lightly-expired beer from the bar where he worked.

The window was only open because Sirius had threatened to chuck Remus’s wontons out the window, his way of retaliating after Remus said he was shit at Guitar Hero.

He’d left the window open. No-one heard her climb up the fire escape.

The next thing any of them knew, a bundle had somersaulted through the window, streaked across the room, and was holding a knife to Sirius’s throat.

There was a lot of screaming, a lot of Remus standing at the bar not doing anything.

James had stood up, hands above his head, and said, “However much you’re being paid to do this, I’ll give you double.”

“Who says I’m being paid to kill him?” came the voice, from under the balaclava. Decidedly female.

“It’s the more likely option,” Remus said calmly, taking a sip of his soda.

“He’s funny,” said the girl.

“No, he’s not,” Sirius said, and the girl pressed the knife harder. He gagged.

“Just out of interest,” Remus asked casually, “who’s paying you to kill him?”

“About 5’8, brown eyes, looks like a version of this guy—“ she gave Sirius a shove, “—that got spun through the wash too many times.”

Sirius had gone still. “My _brother_ paid you to do this?”

“I must say,” she said, dragging off her balaclava, revealing eyes the colour of dishwashing liquid and hair like a bloodstain, “I can see why he wants you dead.”

“Now, hang on—“ Sirius began.

“I’ll give you the money in cash.” James interrupted him.

The girl seemed to be considering it.

“Deal,” she said, releasing Sirius, moving over to the window.

“Oh, and just so you know,” she added, one leg over the sill, “Regulus offered me ten thousand.”

And with that, she disappeared.

“Jesus,” James had said, “ten thousand?”

“Yeah, you may be annoying, mate,” Remus said to Sirius, “but you’re not worth that much.”

* * *

She came back again, one night. The TV was blaring and James had just received an expensive bottle of wine from his parents as a birthday present, half of which had been drunk.

Sirius had wanted a smoke, so he’d left the window open. The next thing they knew, the curtain was being swept aside, and the girl clambered through the window, straightening up and brushing snow out of her hair.

“Hello,” she’d said.

“What the fuck?” had been Sirius’s response.

She moved quickly, drawing curtains and turning off the TV and locking the door.

“Um,” James had started, “can we help you?”

“Shut up,” she’d said, taking her knife out of her boot, holding it between her teeth while she tied her shoelace.

“Come back to finish the job, have you?” Sirius asked.

She spun, pressing the knife to his throat. James was having déjà vu.

“You value your life, Black?” she’d asked.

“Not really.”

She continued like he hadn’t answered. “Then shut the fuck up.” And with that, she went to peek through the curtains, looking for something. Someone.

“OK,” she said, after a while, “I think they’re gone.”

“Who’s gone?” Remus asked.

“The police.”

“The _police_?” James had yelled.

“You must not be a very good serial killer if you’ve got the police on your tail,” Sirius commented, and the girl looked at him like she wanted to kill him, for real this time.

“So you _are_ a serial killer, then, are you?” Peter had asked. They’d caught him up after he’d come back from the toilet, last time, though he hadn’t believed them.

Lily looked at him, then, with such a hopelessly blunt look that James’s stomach dissolved and all the clocks in the apartment stopped.

“Yeah,” she said. “Something like that.”

* * *

She was kind of a given, after that.

* * *

“You’re like our personal bodyguard,” Sirius says one day, lying on the stupidly expensive couch.

“You’d have to pay me for that, you know,” she tells him. “If your brother sends someone else after you I’m not intervening.”

Sirius throws a cushion at her in response, which she bats into a lamp, smashing the globe.

“You’re paying for that,” James says to her.

“No thanks.” She grins at him, all teeth. Her smile is like the edge of a knife.

“What’s the point of having you around, then?” Sirius says.

“Because I could literally murder all of you in your sleep,” she tells them, picking at her nails.

“That,” Sirius says, getting up for a beer even though it was only four in the afternoon, “is an excellent point.”

* * *

They have this rule: don’t talk about how Lily kills people or how last week they found a dead guy in the living room or how it’s all a bit mad.

* * *

She has to sleep with the lights on, he notices.

He gets up early for no reason, one morning, thinking that if he’s awake before the sun, it might make him write. Somehow, he knows it won’t.

When he comes out into the living room, all the lights are on, and she’s asleep on his couch.

He watches her for a second, knowing she could wake up at any second and stab him, too entranced to care.

She looks peaceful when she’s asleep, he thinks. A lot less angry. There’s no crease between her eyebrows, no sharpness to her jaw. Her chest rises and falls steadily. With her eyes closed, she’s looks just like a normal girl.

He takes a step back, steps on an empty beer can, makes a racquet. She wakes up in a rush, knife drawn, eyes wild.

“It’s just me,” he tells her, hands raised.

She narrows her eyes at him. “Your hair looks like shit,” she says.

He raises an eyebrow at her, heads to the fridge.

“Stop breaking into my apartment,” he tells her.

He hears her yawn. “Stop making it so easy for me, then.”

* * *

_Is she even human?_ she wonders one night. She might as well be made of stone. It’s not like the people she’s killing aren’t bad. They are. They’ve done terrible things. She just wishes she could stop—

“You OK?”

He comes out through the stairwell, out onto the roof, where she is currently lying. There’s a piece of gravel that’s really digging into her back and she can smell something dying. She thinks it might be her.

 _No._ “Not really.”

He gets down next to her, resting his arms behind his head. She can see him in lines, curvature spiralling out into whorls, like a painting. He really is beautiful, she thinks.

“Stop staring at me.” He repeats her words back to her, smiling.

“Wasn’t,” she whispers. She’s definitely lying.

* * *

There’s a week where he doesn’t see her, and they all end up at Lupin’s, sitting in his tiny, cramped kitchen watching Seinfeld on an ancient TV and drinking cheap beer from Sirius’s bar.

“You seen her?” James, sitting at the counter, asks. He’s trying to be cavalier about it and failing miserably.

Remus gives him this look, like he knows, and he definitely does, takes a sip of his beer. “Why d’you ask?”

He toys with his bottle cap. “No reason.”

Sirius shouts something vague, then, about her being at the bar earlier that week. James guesses Sirius is still mad at him for missing their Call of Duty date. He doesn’t blame him.

“She’s dangerous,” Lupin says under his breath.

“You like her, though,” James points out.

“Of course I like her,” he says. “She tried to kill Sirius. Besides,” he drops his voice, “I’m not the one who’s into her.”

“Who said I was into her?”

“Are we talking about how James wants to fuck a murderer?” Sirius shouts, just loud enough for everyone in the Chinese restaurant downstairs to hear.

“Yep,” Remus says, without looking over at Sirius.

“Excellent,” James hisses. He takes another drink.

* * *

The next time he sees her, he’s coming home from Sirius’s bar, where he’d been for most of the night in the hope that she’d be there.

He’s aimlessly wandering the streets, now, walking past fire escapes and guttering streetlights.

When he rounds the corner of Plymouth and Washington, he walks right into her.

She’s covered in blood again, unsurprisingly. There’s a man behind her, slumped against the wall, blood pooling out of the hole in his chest, eyes unseeing. Quite dead.

“Rough night?” he asks.

She looks over at him, stark. After yanking the knife out of the man’s chest, she heads over to him.

“Where were you?” he asks quietly, looking down at her. _God, he’s happy to see her._

She wipes the knife on her shirt so she doesn’t have to look at him. “Had an out-of-town job. Took a few days off.”

“I thought you were dead in a ditch,” he says, taking off. She falls into step beside him.

“Why do you care?” she asks, sounding petulant.

He doesn’t know why. “Just do,” he says.

She wipes blood—not hers—off her nose. All of a sudden, she’s feeling very thirteen years old again.

He’s quiet for a moment, thinking about how utterly stupid and dangerous this is, not caring a bit.

“Hey,” he says, suddenly, “any chance you know how to pick a lock?”

“Of course,” she says. “Why?”

“Sirius has the keys to my place and I just remembered I don’t have a spare.”

“You just remembered?” she asks. _A likely story_ , she thinks. “How were you planning to get into your apartment, then?”

“Not sure,” he says, shrugging. “Just hoped I’d run into you, I guess.”

She has to bite the inside of her cheek, hard, to stop herself from smiling.

* * *

They’re sitting in a pub at an hour that’s wildly inappropriate to be sitting in a pub. Weak light is streaming through the dusty curtains and catching the motes on the air. Nothing feels quite real, and the only reason they’re here is because they haven’t gone to bed yet.

She’s staring morosely at a spot on the mustard-coloured wall, eyes glazed over the lip of her drink, a thousand miles away from him. He’s gotten used to this.

She breaks the silence. “My sister tried to sell me on eBay when I was eleven,” she tells him.

He sips his beer thoughtfully. “Sirius tried to do the same thing to his brother.”

There’s a pause.

“Maybe that’s why he hired me to kill him,” she says, still not looking at him.

He takes another sip. “Probably one of the reasons, yeah.”

Sirius, not doing his job, brings them cheap wine and stale pretzels. His boss yells at him, and Lily considers taking him out, free of charge. She doesn’t, though.

 _Probably best_ , she thinks.

Sirius would be out of a job if she did.

* * *

She climbs in through the window one day, coughing her ass off. She’s sick because she’s been out fighting in the rain.

He sticks her in bed with a hot water bottle and tells her to sleep it off. She threatens to pry his kneecaps off with a crowbar, which she has done, before.

He brings her tea and old movies and cleans up her dirty tissues, her threatening him the whole time.

“I could burn your nipples off,” she tells him.

“A tragedy,” he responds. He ends up calling Sirius, who sits in bed with her. The two of them complain about having utterly shit families who do utterly shit things and how they’re probably utterly shit people because of them.

Remus brings round hot soup and Peter gets her cronuts from the bakery on Third because she said they were her favourite. The lot of them play blackjack and take useless Buzzfeed quizzes and watch Seinfeld on James’s laptop.

A week in she loses her appetite. He googles her symptoms, and it turns out she has the flu.

“I don’t get sick,” she protests, before running into his bathroom to throw up in the toilet.

He holds her hair out of her face as she dry retches, brings her damp flannels to mop her forehead, changes the sheets on his bed after she sweats all over them.

Once she’s stopped puking, it takes a few days before she starts to feel better.

“You have to eat something,” he tells her one evening, shoving a plate of toast under her nose.

“Don’t want to,” she complains, pushing the plate away and burrowing under the covers.

 _Who knew serial killers were such pussies_ , he thinks, briefly.

“I know you don’t want to, Evans, but you need to,” he says, pushing the plate back towards her and heading into the bathroom to piss.

“When are you going to stop taking care of me,” he hears her say, as he lifts up the toilet seat.

He debates this for a moment. _Never_ , he thinks.

* * *

They take her out for Chinese for her birthday.

All five of them manage to squeeze in a booth in a discrete corner of the restaurant beneath Remus’s apartment. They order wontons and dumplings and chicken noodle soup, and James traces nonsense shapes on the table to distract himself from how his knee is pressed against hers under the table.

She’s antsy for most of the night, looking around at all of the middle-aged customers with sticky-fingered kids.

“You OK?” he asks her. It takes him a second before he realises that she’s worried she might be seen.

“Yeah,” she tells him. “Will you move closer to me?”

“Why?” he asks, already moving of his own accord.

“Less chance of being seen,” she explains, cheeks heating as he gets near. She’s meant to be better than this, she thinks. She enjoys that she isn’t.

“We need to act inconspicuous,” she says. “Just pretend to say funny things to me all night."

He grins at her. “What d’you mean, ‘pretend’?” She punches him under the table and he tries not to wince.

“Stop flirting,” Sirius says, throwing a dumpling at them.

They get her mooncakes and sing to her, despite her protests. There’s no-one in the restaurant looking closely at her, anyway. Except for him.

His hand finds hers under the table. She doesn’t move away.

* * *

He walks in on her dealing with a client, one day. Several of them, actually.

He’d climbed down the fire escape for a smoke, a habit he’s picked up from her. According to her, all the best writers smoke, anyway. He’s fool enough to believe her.

It’s pouring with rain, and she’s fighting with three guys in the alley behind the apartment.

The funny thing is, he likes to imagine her doing this. In his sleep. And whenever he pictures her, she’s amazing; swift and brutal, knife drawn, men dropping like flies.

She is not amazing.

It’s strange, considering he's seen her snatch a fly in middair with chopsticks, which happened when they got takeaway last week. She can grab things that are tossed to her without looking. She and Sirius like to play a game where he throws peanuts to her and she has to catch them in her mouth. She never misses.

And that’s why this doesn’t make sense to him.

It’s mostly because he’s seen her kill before. In those moments she’s been fast and succinct and terrifying—knife out, fast moving.

This is different.

She’s choppy, waning, clearly taking her time, slow-moving and stumbling from target to target. Her movements are jagged, sluggish. There are three guys, and one of her, and it’s taking a while.

He doesn’t offer to help.

“How long have you been out here?” he asks her, lifting the cigarette to his lips.

“Fifteen minutes,” she says, dodging a blow from one of the larger men.

He leans back against the wall, smoke spilling from his lips, both of them absorbed in their pursuits.

He smokes and she kills.

And watching her quietly, playing with her food, taking her time, it occurs to him that perhaps she doesn’t enjoy this very much at all.

One of the guys lunges for her while her back is turned, busy dealing with the largest member of the group, and James can’t help it. The guy is armed, and it’s raining, and he’s trying to hurt Lily.

He doesn’t even think about it, not really. He just acts.

He comes in and twists the man’s arm up and out, hears the snap and the scream. Lily dispatches the other two, sees the bodies hit the ground.

The man in James’s grip wrenches free, knife in hand, comes up behind her.

James screams her name, runs forward, pushes the man to the ground.

That’s when she turns around, hand closed in a fist around the knife’s hilt, slits the man’s throat.

The rain is sliding down the back of James’s neck when Lily turns to face him.

“You stupid, stupid boy,” she whispers.

It’s Manhattan, so it’s no wonder there are sirens blaring, but right there, in the pouring rain, with police cars sounding in the distance, he kind of wants to kiss her.

And that’s when she collapses in his arms. It seems the knife didn’t miss her, after all.

James rushes back up to the apartment, holding her in his arms.

He leaves his soggy cigarette on the ground.

* * *

Upstairs, she bleeds out on his couch, for real, this time. The first thing he did was call Remus, who’s studying medicine, because he can’t call the police.

“James,” she whispers, sobbing in his arms, “I felt him. I felt him and I was going to let him do it.”

She’s talking about the knife, of course. It wasn’t a lucky hit. She just didn’t move out of the way.

“No, Lily,” he whispers to her, “no, no, no.”

Remus busts through the door five minutes later, Sirius and Pete in tow, carrying a stack of medical books and armfuls of bandages, while Lily is pale-faced on the couch, breathing shallowly.

Remus sets Peter to work on making a saline solution to clean the wound, gets Sirius to rip up some of James’s old t-shirts, tells James to place Lily on her stomach so he can get at the wound.

After fifteen minutes, she’s barely conscious, but she’s breathing. Remus stems the bleeding and bandages the cut, and despite losing a lot of blood, he tells James, whose hands are still shaking, that she’s going to be OK.

* * *

While she’s recovering, they sit out on the fire escape together, sharing cigarettes even though they’re not meant to be and ignoring the way their legs get tangled, heartstrings pulling in the chasms of their chests.

“I moved out here when I was thirteen,” she tells him, looking at the skyline. They can almost see the Manhattan bridge from here. “My parents died when I was young, and after that it was just me and my sister. She never really wanted me around, so one day I just… left.”

He makes up his mind then that he doesn’t like her sister, one bit.

“After that, I… I struggled to make a living. The police wanted to send me back to my sister. The system kind of sucks, so I fell in with some people who helped me get out, but…” She carries off, after that.

“That’s how you ended up here,” he finishes for her.

“Yeah,” she says. “They needed someone who could run fast and I was good at cross country."

She swings her legs when she talks, he notices. It makes him wish he could have known her when she was a kid, before all this, before she stopped being able to scrape the blood out from under her nails.

"It’s funny," she says abruptly.

“What is?” he asks her.

 _That most kids at 13 are having Sports Days and I was learning how to kill people_ , she thinks. “Nothing.”

“No, tell me.”

She decides then that she’s scared of this, the way he makes her feel. It’s stupid. She’s strung a man up by his ankles and removed each of his toenails, but she can’t handle the way he knocks his shoulder against hers, goads her on, looks expectantly at her like he’s always waiting to hear what she has to say. She’s slit a man open gullet to balls, and yet she’s terrified of making him laugh, the way it rattles through her chest cavity and wakes up her old, tired bones.

She’s a horrible person, and she knows this, but he makes her feel like she can pretend, just for a second.

They sit on the fire escape together, sharing a cigarette, watching the storm clouds roll in.

* * *

She’s mad. She doesn’t know why she’s mad, but she is.

After pounding on the door for a solid minute, he opens the door, wearing a towel. His hair is wet, and her stomach does a 180°.

“Let me in,” she tells him.

He frowns at her. “Are you in trouble?”

“No,” she says. It’s true, for once.

She’s sick of running. Maybe that’s why she’s mad. She’s mad because she hasn’t been able to sit down for six years and her legs are always aching. There’s a gaping hole in her chest where most people have a conscience, she keeps stealing from the service station because she doesn’t see the point anymore. Last week she let herself get beat up a little bit because she wanted to know what it felt like.

He moves aside, lets her in.

She collapses on the couch, head in her hands.

He disappears for a moment, comes back wearing a pair of drawstring pants. She kind of wishes he’d kept the towel.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?”

 _No._ “Probably not.”

He sighs, sits down opposite her, tries to case her the way she does him. He’s shit at that.

She takes out her knife, uses it to start carving gorges in his coffee table. She’s getting bad. She’s getting really, really bad.

He listens to the sound for a while, the whittling, hollowing scraping awfulness. He wants it to stop. He wants her to be safe.

He reaches out, catching her wrist. It’s the first time he’s ever touched her without permission.

“Evans,” he tells her sternly. “Stop.”

“Let go of me.”

“Stop wrecking my coffee table.”

“I said, _let go of me_.”

He does, collapses back against the couch.

She should just kill him, she thinks. It would make things so much easier. In her experience, when people are dead they usually stay that way.

She goes to raise the knife at the same time he reaches out, grabs her, pulls her to him.

“Get off me!”

“Evans,” he says, and this time, his voice is so, so broken, “stop.”

She’s crying without realising, shuddering, shaking so deeply, rattling her bones. The knife is still in her hand, blade pressing into his forearm, making him bleed. He doesn’t even notice and he doesn’t let go.

She stops struggling in his arms, clutches to him like he’s her life force, and maybe he is, and it’s utterly tragic, that. She holds onto him so tightly, like she’s trying to exsanguinate him. She did that to a guy once. _Oh my God, what is wrong with her?_

She’s mad. _Why is she mad?_ She’s mad because the safest she’s ever felt is when sleeping on his couch. She’s mad because no-one’s ever looked at her with anything other than fear or disgust, she’s mad because she feels like shit 100% of the time, she’s mad because she wants to run but she thinks no matter how far she goes she’d end up back here, in his arms, holding on him, her knife driving into his arm.

“ _James_.”

“It’s OK, Evans. I’ve got you.”

“No, James, you’re bleeding.”

“I don’t care.”

“No, no, I need to fix you up.”

“Evans—“ he catches her face in his hands, just as she’s about to spin away from him, brushing hair out of her eyes. There’s a pause, and then he kisses her, and after that, there’s really no turning back.

* * *

He makes her feel awake.

* * *

“So how long have you been fucking?” Sirius asks her, bluntly, a few weeks later. She’s not sure how he knows, but in hindsight, the other day Sirius rocked up when she was wearing one of James’s t-shirts and not much else.

“What makes you say that?” she asks, feigning nonchalance.

“Because you’ve been eye-fucking for the past fifteen minutes.”

She sighs, doesn’t see any point in lying. “A few weeks,” she tells him.

“Lupin!” Sirius shouts. “You owe me fifteen bucks!”

Remus groans, and she looks at Sirius, accosted. “You were betting on us sleeping together?”

“Of course,” he says, like this should be obvious.

She narrows her eyes at him. “You do realise I could gut you in your sleep and make it look like an accident?”

“You know, Evans, that’s the thousandth time you’ve threatened to kill me and haven’t followed through. I’m starting to think you’re going soft on me.”

“Am not,” she says, shoving his shoulder.

She knows he’s right.

* * *

One morning, James wakes up one morning to find her making coffee in her underwear.

“You alright, Evans?” he says, running a hand through his hair.

She turns around, _Doctor Who_ mug in hand that Remus got her for her birthday. “Fine, thanks, Potter,” she tells him.

He grins, comes over to the shitty coffee maker, ignores her proximity to him and how she still makes him feel like a live wire.

“By the way,” she says, “I used all the milk.”

This, he does not mind.

“I can’t believe you’re not sick of me yet,” she whispers to him.

“I could never be sick of you,” he tells her honestly.

* * *

“You’re gonna be great, one day, you know,” she tells him, sitting on the couch, reading his latest manuscript.

He smiles at her. “Penguin offered me a publishing deal.”

Her eyes go wide. “No fucking way!” she says, punching him so hard he can taste the bruise.

They end up toasting to him, that night, at Sirius’s shitty bar. While Peter plays arcade games and Remus wins at darts and Sirius flirts instead of doing his job, James sits next to her at the counter, drinking slightly more expensive wine and eating pretzels that are still stale.

She’s laughing at something he said, and he doesn’t think he’s ever seen her this free, this uninhibited. She didn’t case the joint when she came in, count the exits like she usually does. She didn’t even wear sunglasses in here, feigning blindness just so no-one would remember her face.

“Hey,” he says, “I’ve got something for you.”

She narrows her eyes at him. “It better not be a fucking ring.”

He laughs. “It’s not a ring,” he confirms.

“Alright, then,” she says.

“Close your eyes,” he tells her.

He holds his breath as she does, how she trusts him completely, doesn’t doubt him for a second.

He places it in her outstretched hand, tied with a piece of red ribbon.

She opens her eyes, frowns. “A key?” she asks.

He smiles, fiddles with his beer bottle. “So you don’t have to break into the apartment anymore.”

He hears her intake of breath. She frowns at it, like it’s a foreign object.

There’s a silence, and he thinks he’s made a horrible mistake.

When she looks up at him her eyes are swimming with tears.

“ _Thank you_ ,” she whispers.

He gives her an honest look, knocking against her. “Anything for you, Evans.”

She smiles at him, still crying.

He bites his bottom lip, looks down at the bartop. “Can I kiss you?” he asks her, softly.

“Yes,” she says, almost instantly.

He looks at her, hesitant, leans forward slowly, one hand skimming her neck, coming up to cup against her jaw. She shivers.

He closes his eyes for a moment, nose brushing against hers, and for second he’s not an almost-failed writer living in Manhattan, and she isn’t a girl who kills people.

She whispers to him, “I could kill you, you know.”

He opens his eyes, looks at her questioningly. “Does that mean you don’t want me to kiss you?” he asks.

“Absolutely not,” she says, and kisses him first.

**Author's Note:**

> theres also a corresponding pinterest board for this fic, if ur interested:
> 
> https://www.pinterest.com.au/eleanorshellstrop/blood-bleeds-blue/


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